16 August: St. Joachim (1962MR)

Today in the traditional Roman calendar is the Feast of St. Joachim, father of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

St. Joachim’s name in Hebrew (&#1497;&#1456;&#1492;&#1493;&#1465;&#1497;&#1464;&#1511;&#1460;&#1497;&#1501;) means "he whom YHWH has set up".

His feast was not in the 1570 Missale Romanum. It was added in 1584 for 20 March (the day after the Feast of St. Joseph). In 1738 it was moved to the Sunday after the Octave of the Assumption of Mary. All of those Octaves were eliminated sometime before 1962. Pope St. Pius X moved it 16 August in order to associate it more closely with the Blessed Virgin Mary. In the post-Conciliar calendar St. Joachim’s feast was joined to that of St. Anne, his wife and mother of the Blessed Virgin for 26 July.

Yes, but though it seems rare. Usually during the beatification and canonization process, the person in question is exhumed and first class relics may be taken then.

Canon Law forbids the selling of relics, so I am not sure how to obtain them. I do have a relic of Venerable Pope John Paul the Great; a piece of his cassock fixed to a prayer card for his beatification and canonization. The Cause gave these away, for a donation covering postage. Of course, I am not sure when it “officially” becomes a relic… when declared a Servant of God? Venerable? Blessed? Saint?

As I’m sure I’ve said before I would love to have a Relic of St. Philomena and St. Mary Magdalne, but the closest I’ll come is the Relicquary which was borrowed by the FSSP for the Mass of the Assumption yesterday.

The following comes from the website of the Church of Santa Susanna, the parish of the USA, in Rome:

9. My mother has a great devotion to the Little Flower, how can I get a relic of the saint for her birthday?

At one time, it was quite common to find a number of places in Rome that would allow you to acquire a relic. A relic can never be purchased because it is a holy object, but you would make an offering for the metal case in which it came. The largest collection of relics in Rome belongs to the Vatican and it kept at the Lateran. Actually they are kept at a small convent nearby. The practice of making relics available to the public ended more than ten years ago at the insistence of the Vatican. Today you can apply to this Reliquarium for a specific relic only with a Nihil Obstat or a letter of permission from your local bishop. You must also state that the relic is to be used for a church altar or other public religious purpose. The private ownership of relics is highly discouraged. ( http://www.santasusanna.org/faqLinks/faqLinks.html )

The encouragement and discouragement of relics in private hands depends a lot of what class of relic you’re talking about. First class relics is what makes the Vatican a bit nervous these days. (And to be fair, that would be a big responsibility.) Other kinds of relic are still in need of care and respect, but the potential for abuse or misunderstanding is less.

With respect to uncertainties as to the authenticity of a relic, may I suggest for consideration the response of the (Church of England) Archdeacon (and avid reader of Julian of Norwich) in Charles Williams’s novel, ‘War in Heaven’, on learning of a confident scholarly case that the old chalice at his parish is in fact the Holy Grail? He prays, “Ah, fair sweet Lord, […] let me keep this Thy vessel, if it be Thy vessel; for love’s sake, fair Lord, if Thou hast held it in Thy hands, let me take it into mine. And, if not, let me be courteous still to it for Thy sake, courteous Lord; since this might well have been that, and that was touched by Thee.”

as far as I am aware in the oldee days it was quite common for family’s (especially ones who could afford to slip the cardinal a new castle or two) to acquire relics in a family reliquary for private veneration – whilst I appreciate the need for caution, responsabiilty and a process surely the world wouldn’t end if the Catholic public were able to venerate relics at a family altar?

One of the Dutch Papal Zouaves collected over 400 hundred relics during his time of service in Rome, including one for a saint for each day of the year! (The reliquary case is now in the Zouave Museum in Oudenbosch in the Netherlands.)

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Food For Thought

“The legalization of the termination of pregnancy is none other than the authorization given to an adult, with the approval of an established law, to take the lives of children yet unborn and thus incapable of defending themselves. It is difficult to imagine a more unjust situation, and it is very difficult to speak of obsession in a matter such as this, where we are dealing with a fundamental imperative of every good conscience — the defense of the right to life of an innocent and defenseless human being.”

- St. John Paul II

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"One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting."

- C.S. Lewis

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“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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